After years of studying alongside Carmelite nuns, Mario Beauregard, neuroscientist and author of “The Spiritual Brain,” argues a religious experience goes beyond an event in our brain, random neurons firing, or simple delusions, but can occur through a higher power outside of our brain and body. In this interview, Dr. Mario Beauregard speaks with Dr. Oz, and shares evidence and stories of near death experiences that link what many researchers rarely consider. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The consciousness in these states is not related anymore to the physical body.
But the people reporting these experiences have the impression of having a consciousness related to a different kind of organization, a different kind of a more subtle body.
I think that the mind and consciousness can survive the death of the physical body.
Hey, everyone. everyone.
I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
Dr. Mario Beauregard is an associate researcher at the University of Montreal, author of more than 100 publications in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry, and has done some really groundbreaking work in neurobiology of emotion and a mystical experience, which is the part of this I really loved.
Welcome, thanks for joining us.
Thanks to you.
Where are you from originally, by the way?
A region of the province of Quebec called Eastern Township.
It's near the border with Vermont, actually.
So it's about 50 miles south of Montreal.
Perfect.
It's a very pretty part of the continent.
What got you interested in this spirit?
I gather when you were writing your PhD thesis, it was on a bit more than the mystical mind.
Yeah.
Well, at that time, it started really when I was very young, at about eight years old.
I started to have sort of mystical experiences myself.
My father was a farmer, so we had a lot of space, fields, forests, and we were isolated physically, so I didn't have...
That many friends, young friends at that age, and I had a lot of time to think by myself, to reflect on all kinds of things.
And in the woods, in the field, I became convinced, it was like a kind of insight, that mind and soul and brain were all interrelated.
But were not the same thing.
You could not reduce what we call mind and even soul, the essence of human being, to what was going on in the brain.
And at that age, I decided later on to become a scientist, to be able to demonstrate that.
That was a dream of a child, if you will.
And that was the main motivation, the starting point.
And after that, I've had several intense spiritual experiences in my life.
Including a near-death experience.
What happened there?
Pardon me?
What happened with your near-death experience?
Oh, I've been very, very sick when I was 19 years old.
I was suffering from several viral infections.
And my nervous system was attacked too.
And I've been lying down in a bed for about a year.
Oh, you're kidding me.
So that's at the beginning of university.
And so that's how this experience happened.
Because I was...
I didn't have any energy left and I was feeling like somebody suffering from AIDS or terminal cancer.
And that's when the near-death experience happened and it was a turning point for me.
So what was your PhD in specifically?
Well, I was studying the effect of various chemical messengers like serotonin and dopamine in some parts of the brain involved in cognitive functions and also emotion.
But I was working with rodents then.
And then I switched after that to monkeys.
I did some work at NIMH. And after that...
NIMH is the National Institute of Mental Health.
Yes.
You're here in the States.
Yes.
And after that, the functional neuroimaging techniques developed widely and very rapidly.
And so I decided to start using these techniques to investigate questions more related to human consciousness and also spiritual Neurality.
So neuroimaging, so functional MRI. Exactly.
PET scans.
And the like.
Yes.
So walk us through sort of the basic premise of the book, just to get everyone on the same page.
And then I want to quiz you a little bit on the actual experiments.
Well, yes.
Well, the basic premise is that in the book, I challenge the mainstream dogma in current neuroscience, which is that mind is what the brain does and that...
Spirituality and spiritual experiences in general can all be reduced to misfiring neurons in various portions of the brain.
So for most neuroscientists, very famous neuroscientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, These experiences are simply delusions created by a brain which is functioning in a dysfunctional manner.
And they relate these experiences mostly to the temporal lobe region because it's well known that some epileptic patients, when the seizures are located within the temporal lobe region, Well, they will report sometimes religious or spiritual experiences.
It does not happen often, but it does.
And based on this, many neurologists and also neuroscientists have claimed that this is a demonstration that all these experiences are simply delusions or hallucinations.
And I decided to challenge this in the book.
So is there a soul?
That's the fundamental question.
Yes, but it's a matter of semantics.
Of course, in neuroscience, we do not discuss about the soul itself.
But in the book, I try to demonstrate that there's, if you will, a spiritual component of human nature, which cannot be systematically reduced to electrical and chemical processes in the brain.
And if you take the case of near-death studies, for instance, it's very interesting, because there are cases now where we know for sure that the brain was not functioning within the context of, for instance, a standstill procedure, surgery when the heart is stopped and the blood is surgery when the heart is stopped and the blood is totally drained from the head and there's no EEG activity anymore.
And yet, We have cases where the person undergoing the surgery was able to float over her physical body and to report veridically information concerning the surgical instruments that were used, the dialogues between the surgeons and the nurses and the cardiologists, for instance, and doctors.
Also during that state, some of these experiencers also report traveling along a tunnel and meeting with deceased relatives and friends.
And the last step of this experience is the meeting, the encounter with a beautiful being, a flight, a sentient being.
And for most of these experiencers, this being of light represents God, if you will.
So we have a case, in particular the case of Pam Reynolds.
And she underwent such a surgery in Phoenix, Arizona 15 years ago.
And so we know for sure that there was no brain activity in her brain.
Using EEG, at least no electrical activity, and yet she's been able to report veridical information concerning the environment.
And so she was able to have consciousness.
She was able to perceive, to feel, and to remember who she was.
And so that may be a definition of what we call the soul, if you will, because apparently the brain was not functioning anymore.
Right.
Go ahead.
I was just wondering how a neuroscientist, not yourself, but someone on the opposite side, would explain that phenomenon.
Well, they will negate this experience.
They will say that probably she was able to hear something, or she was not really clinically dead.
They are forced to try to reject it.
All these lines of evidence, because they do not fit with the mainstream materialist worldview, which is still dominant across all science disciplines, but especially in neuroscience.
Because it's really like a religious dogma.
The mind and the soul, if you will, are simply what the brain does.
So when the brain stops functioning, there's nothing left anymore.
One argument that I've heard, Lisa, is that you have a place in the temporal lobe that is responsible for pulling together our senses into an experience.
So it pulls together sight and hearing, sensation, touch.
And that creates my perception of me being here in the studio talking to Mario and you.
And when we start to lose blood to the body of the brain, because that's a watershed area, it's the place in between where arteries go to the brain, it's one of the first places they get ischemic, become having inadequate blood.
And once you lose that connection of the senses, then you have individual senses, because you're more dominant, and you just have those flighty memories.
So you hear, although you may not see, or you hear and see, but you don't feel.
You don't have the appropriate sense of fear, for example, when you're going through this.
Now, this may actually be something that is normal for the brain to deal with because when you take certain types of drugs, it probably creates these kinds of events as well.
I agree, Mario, that there's a religious difference here.
And it has to be described in that phrase because that's really what it's like.
You either believe it's possible or you believe it's not possible, then you fit the data to what you believe.
I just want to understand a little better...
At least an intelligent neuroscientist type insight about how this could be.
If, in fact, we have a metaphor, which is probably not quite accurate, but is often used about hardware and software, then it does offer some opportunities to explain the brain, but some limitations as well.
Do you buy into that metaphor for how our brain functions?
Well, to a certain degree, but the question is, what is the origin of the software?
Because if, for us, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, the software can be identified to what we call the mind or mental functions, mental processes, then it's quite possible.
Because, for instance, in my lab, I've done a series of neuroimaging studies showing that If you take the case of psychotherapy, for instance, when the patients can restructure what we call cognitive schemas or thought processes, for instance, regarding specific phobia, spider phobia.
Right.
When they do that, if you scan them before and after therapy, it will change that the brain is totally transformed, that new circuits emerge, and that the regions that are associated with, for instance, emotion processing, processing of negative events and similarly emotionally, well, their activity decreased dramatically after therapy.
So it's true that...
Whenever we change the mind or the software is modified, then what's going on in the brain, in the hardware, modifies accordingly.
So that's true.
And to recognize that, we know that also based on the placebo effect, because there has been a few studies recently showing that, for instance, in Parkinsonian patients, when they have a degree of destruction of about 80% of their nerve cells producing dopamine, Mm-hmm.
If they believe in the placebo treatment, they can start producing, releasing dopamine in their brain like healthy normal subjects for a while.
And so it's clear based on this that beliefs, expectations, thoughts can modulate markedly what's going on in the brain.
But to recognize that does not mean that the mind can exist independently of the brain.
But I agree with this metaphor.
The software dramatically influenced what's going on in the hardware.
However, we don't know the extent to which the software or who writes the software is independent of...
You know, what's going on in the hardware?
That's a crucial question.
It is a crucial question, and it's a very good point, because today the software does not modify the hardware.
And when we can understand that, we'll have smarter machines, but I think that is part of the future where computing is going.
Absolutely.
It may be based on how our brain actually works.
When we come back with Dr. Mario Beauregard, the author of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul, I'm going to ask a little bit about how we perceive reality outside of ourselves. I'm going to ask a little bit about how we Let me come back to this basic issue of how we perceive the world outside of us, because it is a part of this broader discussion about spirituality.
You left me with the very intriguing idea that the metaphor of the brain having a hardware and a software may not be that inaccurate, as long as we're willing to admit that the software can modify the hardware.
Right.
So how do we perceive the world outside of us?
How do we go from the objective reality that a brain cell senses light or an edge because it fires or doesn't fire to putting all these things together to recognize our grandmother or an experience that's so much more complicated than what one cell might be able to figure out?
Well, in reality, we don't know yet.
So what we know are what we call the neural correlates of these experiences.
So we know, for instance, if you take the case of a visual system, how are you able to perceive your grandmother or a tree?
So we know what's going on in terms of neural activity at the level of the retina and also the nerve pathways in the visual system and the visual cortex at the back of our heads.
So we know...
Which regions are doing, you know, what type of treatment or processing of information.
But the mystery still remains how it's possible for these regions to bind all the information together, the data or the information processing, to create what we call, for instance, a single percept.
So this is called a binding problem.
Mm-hmm.
And, of course, it's related to awareness and consciousness.
So, for instance, visual awareness.
So, there are multiple models about this yet, but no very robust theory.
Is there even one simple example of a more complex action than recognizing a line that we know works in the brain?
Is there any way we can understand how we recognize things, for example?
Well, we have models about it.
So according to the current models, there's a storage of information regarding the objects in the external world and also internally.
So the...
The perceptual system is closely related with the memory system, and so the memory retrieval or the recognition, for instance, of a given object in the external world would be related to the reactivation, for instance, of the information processing related to this object, for instance, a cop or a tree or whatever.
So the current models propose that.
But for the conscious aspect of the experience, what we call technically the qualia, you know, associated with viewing a tree, for instance, that we don't know.
Then how do we go from even that most basic aspect?
Insight that we need to have to the, for me anyway, much more challenging discussion about spirituality.
And let me ask you this for a practical way.
Why do some people seem to be more easily able to have an out-of-body experience, to have a spiritual experience than others?
Why was it that you, at age eight, could walk into the woods in northern Quebec and have one of these aha spiritual coming-to-God moments and most of the kids your age didn't?
What's different about your brain?
Well, perhaps it's not related to the brain.
Who knows?
That's an argument stopper.
Yeah, but who knows?
It's not been studied yet.
So there have been reports of spiritual experiences, books about this, where they have, well, a few studies, including thousands of experiences by all kinds of people across the world.
In the UK, for instance, in the 70s and 80s.
And so they collected thousands of reports from all kinds of people.
And these people, so in these studies, they were not able to establish correlation with, for instance, the socioeconomic status or the level of education or apparently genetics.
So it's not clear yet why some people will have these experiences and others, not at all.
But there are arguments made about a God gene, for example.
Yes, yes.
Any merit to this?
Well, no, because it's not very well supported empirically.
And even the geneticist who wrote the book is now backing up regarding this because it's too simplistic.
We know that for all kinds of behaviors, you need the involvement of thousands of genes and the interactions between these genes.
So it doesn't seem to be that simple.
So it's more complicated.
But...
If you take the case of people believing and having spiritual beliefs, these people will sometimes tell you that perhaps it's the product, it's related to past lives, you know, reincarnation.
So they use this example, for instance, to say that, how do you explain Mozart, for instance, who was able to play the piano in a grandiose fashion at four years old?
So...
The same explanation could apply to perhaps young people like me who are having spiritual experiences.
Who knows?
There might be a spiritual component or a spiritual dimension involved in these experiences.
So these experiences would be triggered not only by our own volition or by the way our brains are functioning, but also Because of the intervention of another level of reality.
Who knows?
Of course, scientifically, we cannot confirm or disconfirm this kind of thesis.
Just theoretically, these questions must come to you in religious circles.
What are the kinds of questions you get asked for which you're sort of comfortable giving a theoretical answer from spiritual leaders?
And again, I'm not holding you to a very concrete biological explanation, but if a religious leader says, why is it easier for some to believe than others?
Why is it easier for some to let go of reality than others?
Why is it easier for some to acknowledge that 99% of what's around us is just a superficial veneer and deeper reality is the 1% below that, sort of like the matrix?
Is it just a matter of taking time to think it through?
You think it's a hardware issue or you think it's a software issue?
Well, it probably involves both levels, and it's related to the way you've been brought up.
It's a matter of personal belief systems also, so an influence of hidden variables, hidden factors on a spiritual level.
Because it seems that some people are more in touch with Spirituality or spiritual dimensions, if you will.
Whereas other people are more focused on what we can call the material world.
And, you know, there may be all kinds of factors explaining that, including biological factors, genetics, the way the brain is configured, but also other factors, probably.
So it's complex.
The biggest epiphanies for you, the biggest insights as you look at functional MRI and PET scans and try to understand why certain types of behaviors activate certain parts of the brain.
Because I gather as a neuroscientist you're also learning that there are places where the hardware, as you mentioned earlier, gets changed by how the mind is driving the person.
Yeah.
So give me, if you could, a couple of examples.
When someone prays, for example, or meditates for prolonged periods of time, what kind of changes do you see in the brain?
Well, there are a few studies out there that have looked at this specifically for people who have been meditating for...
A few decades, for instance, and apparently this changed even the structure of the brain.
So, for instance, the cortex, cortical layers become thicker in some regions of the brain, and so the structure itself is modified.
And also the way the certain brain regions and certain brain circuits function is altered crucially, dramatically, based on meditation and, for instance, prayer.
I've done a study with Carmelite nuns, cloistered nuns, and we had calculated that these nuns had spent altogether over 200,000 hours in prayer and contemplation in their lives as members of the Carmelite Order.
And so at baseline, during resting state, when we look at their EEG activity, EEG measures electrical activity in the brain.
We have access now to normative database comparing normal population with special groups of subjects.
Well, in these people, these nuns, you see much more delta and theta waves, very slow waves, at rest during resting state than the normal population.
What does that mean?
What does that mean for the average listener?
What's the implication?
Well, it means that probably because of all the time they have spent in prayer and contemplation, it has induced long-term change in the way their brain is functioning.
And we know that these very slow waves are associated with, well, if you take the case of delta waves, you see them in deep sleep, also in certain comas.
Very deep comas.
And tether waves are seen in the period just preceding sleep, falling asleep.
And they have more of these?
Yes, but in the normal population, when you have more delta waves or tether waves, while awake, you're in trouble because you're...
You're challenged connectively.
It's harder for you.
But in the case of these nuns, they are performing very well cognitively.
So it's like if their activity, their contemplative life, has led them to major transformation in the way their brains operate.
And it's possible that because of that, they feel more in touch with the spiritual world.
So, to come back to your question, I don't know, but in my case, perhaps I was born with a specific, perhaps not abnormality, but something a little bit strange about the way the brain was designed.
And this would have allowed me to feel more in touch with other dimensions or realities.
We know.
If you take 10 psychics, self-proclaimed psychics, because I know that people argue whether it's true or not.
Take 10 psychics and then 10 average Joes like me who don't pretend to have any ability to see what's going on without actually seeing what's going on with my own eyes.
How do our brains differ?
Is there anything reproducible?
Difference that a neuroscientist could discern?
It's not been studied yet.
It's starting to be investigated by Dr. Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona.
He's examining what's going on in the brain using EEG while certain psychics become entranced to access other kinds of information.
But it's really just beginning.
So we don't know yet about this.
It's not clear yet.
And if I could, let me ask you about a phrase that's been used to describe you, a non-materialist neuroscientist.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that you can use the tools of modern neuroscience, but...
Without the materialist a priori, without the materialist basic assumption that the mind is what the brain does and that spirituality and spiritual experiences are simply delusions created by an abnormal brain.
So that's exactly what I mean when I say it's not necessary for neuroscientists to be materialists.
It's interesting because when I think about it in that context, some of the fundamental insights that I've gained through the practice of medicine that have challenged my belief that it's all about the chemistry of the brain come to bear.
A good example is the placebo effect.
Here's a change in the way that our body functions based on something that we understand in our brain and maybe in our mind, but doesn't really have any impact on our body except for that.
And yet we see differences that are 30-35%.
Significant differences.
And it calls into question the broader healing role that the placebo effect stimulates in the brain.
How do you explain that?
What mechanistically is happening?
Well, I've proposed recently a theory about that.
It's called psychoneural transduction theory, and it's been published in...
Rolled right up to my tongue.
Psychoneural transduction.
Transduction theory.
I'll come to neuroscientists to make up easy words.
Like the placebo idea.
I published this in Progress of Neurobiology, a very well-known journal in the field of neuroscience, and according to this view, there would be a transduction between what we refer to as mental functions and processes, for instance, beliefs, expectations in the case of placebo effect, and The electrical, chemical and metabolical processes going on in the brain.
So there would be a kind of translation, if you will, between, for instance, a belief or a desire and what's going on in the brain at various levels.
So, for instance...
Fear, fearful thoughts would be associated with or would translate to an increased secretion of cortisol and adrenaline, for instance.
And on the other hand, feelings of well-being...
It would be associated, for instance, with the creation of endorphins or ankyflins.
So, an evolution, biological evolution, would have led to this kind of translation process.
So, in other words, the brain itself would be designed to be able to recognize and to translate what's going on at what we can call the mind level.
When we come back, I want to follow up on this placebo effect that you've been studying and writing about with the big question of what was the adaptive value of it.
We've been trying to get to the root reality of the difference between the brain and the mind.
They come into grips with the different belief systems within medicine that affect how you can explain these, even in your own research.
Let me go back to placebo for a second.
You've very nicely articulated why through a variety of hormonal, neurochemical, and other mechanisms that the expectations of the brain can influence the actions of the body.
It all makes sense to me.
Is there a survival value of this?
Is this something that would happen by chance because no one was thinking about it?
Or do you think there's a benefit of these kinds of impacts, the relatively profound impacts that the brain can have on the body?
Well, because the mind and the brain are very strongly interrelated and the brain is connected also to all the physiological systems in the body, it can have a tremendous value in terms of evolution because if you are able to realize the power you have to influence what's going on in your brain and your physical body, then You know, it can bring tremendous benefits.
But there's a downside because this means that, for instance, if you're not able to, you know, take care of the negative thoughts that you may entertain and negative feelings, then it will have a very negative effect on your brain and your body also.
But it's like if...
Humans have to, at a certain point across evolution, to realize that they have this great power to influence what's going on, you know, in their brains and in their body.
But it can have a great evolutionary value if only the humans can realize that at a certain point across evolution.
You know, I was in Peru and Chile recently, and while traveling through the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, we came upon these cave drawings.
They're drawings that are between a thousand and two thousand years old.
There was a large civilization in this part of South America that actually predates The Incas.
And these illustrations were sort of zany.
They had weird figures of human bodies.
They had arms coming off from weird locations, you know, huge ears.
And the guides who were taking us around, who were very reputable people, really had spent a lot of time studying this, had been educated formally by archaeologists and his topics, believed that these were made by Indian tribes for spiritual reasons.
And they thought that the people making them had been under the influence of hallucinogens.
In fact, there's a Santa Rosa cactus.
There are other peyote.
There are drugs in some of these foods.
Remember, in the desert, the plants, because they have to be very concentrated in their chemicals in order to survive, also concentrate the chemicals that influence us, which is why a quarter of all these plants have medicinal impacts.
In any case, they argued that these cultures used these drugs not to abuse them, but as part of their ritual practices and freed their minds to do this.
Now, this is, again, fast forward 1960 years to 1960, and you've got Timothy O'Leary doing LSD experiments at Harvard and the like.
What is it that these drugs do to our brain that may free the mind to have some of these visions that some can get without the drugs or others seem to need the drugs to get there?
Well, they act mostly, these drugs, on a chemical messenger that is called serotonin.
And serotonin is involved in all kinds of functions, including emotion regulation, but also spiritual experiences.
And what these drugs do in general is that they will...
We've changed the information processing in the brain in such a way that the people ingesting the drug will become focused, but mostly on what's going on internally in terms of consciousness.
So the focus on the external world will reduce and, for instance, the fast EEG waves that you can see during a state of awakening, for instance, will vanish and then you will observe the occurrence of slower waves and it seems that this electrical and chemical shift in the brain will allow an expansion of the sense of self.
Just to be clear for everybody, these are the same slow waves, as you said, the carmelite non-naturally increase, and people who have developmental connective problems have, unfortunately, as well.
Yes, yes, that's right.
Because of this electrochemical shift in the brain, it's like if this shift will allow the experiencers to be able to get in touch with Other types of other realms of reality,
spiritual dimensions, which are not accessible because the brain usually, normally, during the day, when we are very busy cognitively, it acts like a sort of reducing valve.
And so you're more focused on what's going on physically and also internally, but physiologically.
And it's like if it narrows the amount of reality that you can perceive.
So it acts like what we can call a reducing valve.
And if you take the chemicals or You do deep breathing, you can then change the way the brain is operating and you have access to a modified state of consciousness.
So that's why these people have been using such drugs for thousands of years now.
Does physical activity also change these brain waves?
Well, yes, it does.
So, apparently, I've received letters from people doing jogging, for instance, and they told me that after a while, apparently, you hit like a kind of wall, and if you go, you transcend this state, then there's all sorts of modifications neurochemically in the brain and the body, and you can have a very deep mystical experience during these days.
So it's been reported by some joggers that I've received letters from joggers saying that they've had very deep mystical experience while doing jogging.
Let's take that broad theory because I'm curious about how we sort of free ourselves from reality to near death, which is an area you've done some research in.
And writing in the book a little bit about how independence of the mind from the brain might occur at this juncture.
What have you learned about that?
Well, we have a few cases.
I talked earlier about the case of the woman named Pam Reynolds, but there are other cases as well.
And it seems that it's possible for, contrary to the mainstream view in neuroscience, When the brain stops functioning or is not functioning properly, when there's no blood circulation anymore across the brain or EEG activity is totally gone, for instance, the mainstream view that there's nothing that can happen cognitively or emotionally because there's no self-awareness anymore.
But we have cases indicating that, to the contrary, the people...
And this kind of state will experience a greater sense of self and also they are able to have a very vivid sense of perception, for instance, and the feelings.
Everything is like heightened compared to a normal state of consciousness.
So that would suggest that...
Mind and consciousness can operate independently from the brain in certain situations.
But usually, of course, we will talk more of embodied mind and consciousness.
So it's a different sort of mind and consciousness because the consciousness in these states is not related anymore to the physical body.
But the people reporting these experiences have the impression of having a consciousness related to a different kind of organization, a more subtle body, if you will.
That's what they report.
So you could have a completely non-functioning brain?
But a soul that's still able to process or create?
Well, some anecdotal cases suggest that.
But we need to do real research projects, systematic research, to tackle this very intriguing issue.
Well, I ask you because if you had an EEG that was flatlined in a patient who was not resuscitatable, at least as far as we know in modern medicine, in theory then their minds would be able to keep going.
And so when you disconnect the ventilator, for example, and they don't breathe, that mind will be what goes to heaven if you believe in an afterlife.
That's the concept?
Yes.
But if they don't believe in an afterlife, they're trapped in their body anyway.
So I'm not sure it makes much difference.
It is an intriguing concept.
Oh, yeah, of course.
If you separate the two.
What do you think?
What do you think happens to the mind when you die?
I think that the mind and consciousness can survive the death of the physical body.
But it's personal belief, of course.
But it's based also on my own near-death experience.
Based also on subjective reports from other near-death experiencers.
Because there are cases, very impressive cases.
For instance, there's a guy who was dying from brain cancer about 20 years ago, Thomas Benedict, here in America.
And he...
He died clinically for 90 minutes, and he experienced all sorts of fascinating things during his near-death experience, and he came back.
And at the end, in the following days, the brain cancer was totally gone, totally vanished.
And so, if you take all these cases together, They strongly suggest that, yes, mind and consciousness can survive physical death.
We're talking today to Dr. Mario Beauregard, author of The Spiritual Brain, A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul.
Mario, if at the end of the day, and this is pure conjecture, of all the things that you've done as a neuroscientist and the theoretical work you've done looking at the mind, what has taught you the most about God?
What is your takeaway as a seasoned studier of the brain about God's existence?
Well, I think that, at least in my view, and based on my own personal spiritual experiences, I think that, well, first of all, I think God has created the physical universe.
Mm-hmm.
And including all physical matter in the brain.
And it's not vice versa.
Contrary to many of my colleagues, it's not the brain which creates God, but it's vice versa.
And in this view...
The brain itself acts like a kind of interface or transponder and it allows people to have access to all kinds of realities and dimensions and including very intense mystical experience.
So it's possible to communicate with God through prayer, contemplation, meditation.
So that's how I see it.
It's like a marvelous instrument, very sophisticated, that allows all sorts of experience, including this experience of communication with what we call God.
And when this fascinating instrument is destroyed, it's still possible for the essence of the person to To experience communication with God, but using other means, if you will.
There might be another brain, a more subtle brain, that exists after the death of a physical brain.
But that's how I see this question.
Dr. Mario Barigard, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's been an intriguing discussion about the spiritual brain, which is also the title of your book.
